Excerpt: Evergreen Empire

Mice, sometimes rats, almost certainly cockroaches got in. Not long ago she had run out of both smokes and money at the same time. In a restless search fueled by intoxication, she pulled a lost pack from the same place—the space under her seat—and, seeing the obvious damage to the pack by rodents, decided to smoke them anyway. She sat there in the cold damp drivers seat, engine off, total darkness, not even stars, the blue smoke being forcefully huffed out her nostrils like a dragon. Glassy-eyed, she examined the trace of fire at the end of her stick, wishing it had emanated from her belly, something alive contracting to the stiffness of the cabin. She watched it slowly drift in fractals across the still air of the cabin for a while, then passed out in her own dark cave.

She had once been a pretty girl. She had light in her eyes once, and life. She smiled broad white perfectly straight teeth. She practiced making blonde curly tendrils frame her face in the bathroom mirror listening to music recorded a decade before she was born. Hours under those unflattering Hollywood style lighted mirrors made her imagine she was a star. She took a chunk of hair too much for the curler and wrapped it around the hot barrel. She rolled it up, and added a thick lacqueur of flammable hairspray. She waited, she sang along to the music. She only really let go when things started to burn. She cooked in the same manner she curled hair. She knew she would not get sick from macaroni and cheese if she could see the black bits scraped up from the bottom of the pan, be speckling it. She told her boyfriend it was just pepper. He never noticed nor cared.